Aelbert Cuyp came from a family of artists that had
settled in Dordrecht, an old and prosperous
town located at the junction of several major waterways, among them
the Maas River. His grandfather Gerrit was a glazier and his father
Jacob, a successful portrait painter who enjoyed the patronage of
local aristocrats and members of the upper middle class. During
the 1630s, the young Aelbert trained with his father, and in the
early 1640s the two artists collaborated, with Jacob executing the
portraits and Aelbert the landscapes.

By that time, Aelbert had already begun to paint independent
works. Many of these were small-scale landscapes, such as River
Scene with Distant Windmills, which depict Dutch farmland
and waterways, and suggest the quiet harmony of man and nature.
Native subject matter and a similarly narrow color range, primarily
ochres and greenish browns, were prevalent during the 1630s and
early 1640s, a period known as the tonal phase of Dutch landscape
painting. Cuyp may have become acquainted with this style through
the work of Jan van Goyen (1596
- 1656).

Aelbert Cuyp, A River Scene with Distant Windmills,
early 1640s, 14 x 20 5/8 in., The National Gallery, London

Like many early seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists
and marine painters, Aelbert Cuyp captured the essential harmony
of humanity and nature, whether depicting farmers or shepherds in
their fields, skaters enjoying the ice on a cold winters day,
or ships gliding gracefully over inland waterways.

Cuyp also painted mythological and biblical scenes.
A particularly ambitious large-scale picture of this type, painted
early in his career, depicts the mythological hero Orpheus
charming animals with his singing and playing. The scene may
allude to harmonious leadership: just as Orpheus tames different
animals with his music and eloquence, a good leader unites the various
segments of society. The subject gave Cuyp the opportunity to depict
a wide variety of animals, even rare species that he had probably
never seen. For example, the jaguars in the foreground (which are
less detailed in their execution than the horse behind them), may
have been based on a print, and the pangolin (the spiny Asian mammal
at right), on a stuffed specimen from an aristocratic Cabinet of
Wonders.

About 1640, Aelbert Cuyp traveled widely in the Netherlands,
making drawings of Utrecht, The Hague, Amersfoort, Arnhem, and Rhenen.
He made frequent visits to Utrecht, where his father had trained
as an artist. There, Aelbert may have met the landscape painter
Jan Both (d. 1652), who pursued a career painting large-scale, Italianate
landscapes bathed in golden light after he had returned from Italy
in 1641. In the mid-1640s Cuyp's palette became more colorful, and,
perhaps inspired by Jan Both's Italianate
scenes, his landscapes began to incorporate hilly terrains suffused
in the soft golden glow of early morning or evening light. While
some of these landscapes are fanciful, others depict hills, the
Grebbeberg for instance, that he encountered on his travels along
the Rhine River to the eastern Netherlands.

By 1645, Cuyp had developed the visual vocabulary
that he would continue to use throughout his career. Bathing his
scenes in an enchanting atmospheric light and using a relatively
low viewpoint, he created a sense of grandeur, whether depicting
a meadow with grazing cows, farm buildings, waterways, the ruins
of a historic monument, or the graceful cityscape of his hometown
of Dordrecht.

He was also able to capture the dynamism of a historic
event. In The Maas at Dordrecht,
the assembly of the Dutch fleet in July 1646 is represented as a
symbolic show of force on the eve of peace negotiations with the
Spanish, with whom the Dutch had been at war since their revolt
against Spanish rule in 1568. The large number of ships, each crowded
to capacity, signifies the importance of the event. As one ship
fires a salute, a drummer on the large sailing ship in the foreground
announces the arrival of city dignitaries. Cuyp evoked the drama
of the scene through the restless succession of sunlit sails, the
dramatic cloud formations, and the flickering effects of light on
the water.

In the early 1650s, Cuyp once again traveled east
along the Rhine. After passing the city of Nijmegen and its medieval
citadel The Valkhof, he reached
Germany, where the river is flanked by steep hills. He recorded
these scenes in drawings that remained a constant source of artistic
inspiration throughout the 1650s. Many of these drawings --like
those of the flat river landscape surrounding his native Dordrecht--
have a wide, panoramic format that Cuyp also used for some of his
most majestic paintings of this period.

Even though Cuyp enjoyed considerable success as a
painter, he seems to have painted less frequently in the waning
years of his life. This development may relate to his 1658 marriage
to Cornelia Boschman, the widow of a wealthy regent. During the
1660s and 1670s, he was also active as deacon and elder of the Reformed
Church, regent of the sickhouse of the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht,
and member of the High Court of Holland.